Our brief for Progressive Detail week, was to use our research from visiting the V&A, Dover Street Market and Nike Town, with the aim to develop and design our own item of sportswear, taking inspiration and including elements of design from historic garments and styles.
In these images above i wanted to focus on the ruching and gathering of the fabric. Gathering is a sewing technique for shortening the length of a strip of fabric to give shape and structure to an item of clothing, its commonly used in a very obvious way in historic fashion as it is characterised by low and sloping shoulders, a low pointed waist, and bell-shaped skirts that grew increasingly voluminous throughout the decades. Ruching, involves gathering, pleating or repeatedly folding a fabric as an embellishment. This is then incorporated into a pattern, when making clothes, on sleeves, bodices, waistline seams , on accents like collars, belts, on accessories like sashes, hats etc.
Dover Street Market, i found had a very wide range of high end designer clothing, with multiple different styles, many of which contain victorian style clothing relating very well to my project.
From looking around Nike Town and Dover Street Market i could see links from the historic garments styles seen at the V&A, to modern day clothing. In the sportswear department, puffa jackets/gilets are a very popular item of outdoor clothing, as they are filled with down insulation or synthetic fibres, both of which can provide a high level of warmth depending on how well they are made and the quality of the synthetic fibres. They often come with a high neck collar which leans back into a triangle shape, this is very similar to the style of collars on traditional victorian shirts. The puffa outer shape is also created by gathered materials sewn tightly down to each other which helps with creating insulation. As i explored at the V&A, gathering fabrics was a very popular trend in the early 1890’s to enhance the shapes and style of clothing on the body.
Workshops
In the workshops for this past week, I have been looking at details on textiles, and how I could create them into an idea for a element of sportswear. Here i was looking at the detailing on lace, where i developed the patterns seen into my own, i then experimented using my design on parts of clothing and came up with the idea of developing it into breathable vents on sportswear. My ideas for this is presented on garment illustrations in my sketchbook.
From my designs I drew onto paper, these were then photocopied to be used in my 3D stand work, where I was generating design ideas for shapes of garments. I was mainly focusing on the neckline as this is where most of my research from the trip was explored.
This workshop resolved around how to create and evaluate contours of the body to support sportswear, i found this workshop really interesting as it showed me how important stitching and creating pleats is to clothing, without it clothing would have no shapes or structure to fit the body.
